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“Some might object,” the author of this book avers, “that since Tolstoy is dead, he is no longer available to lie down on the couch and free-associate in the fashion prescribed in strictly clinical
analysis” (p. 8). We need not fear that the analysis here is not strict enough, for “no clinician ever had a patient about whom so much detailed and intimate information is available as we have about Lev Tolstoy” (p. 8). In addition to the diaries of Tolstoy and his wife Sonya there are memoirs by friends and admirers, comprising a “rich psychological trove” (p. 8). We may demur at the cavalier attitude toward psychoanalyzing a great novelist of the past, but the test of the book comes with the author's discussion of The Kreutzer Sonata of 1889, a novella in which a seemingly deranged protagonist tells of murdering his wife because he could not control his own sexual urges toward her. Of course the putative motive is quite different—Pozdnyshev tried to convince himself that his wife is having an affair with the violinist accompanying her in Beethoven's sonata. The bulk of the tale consists of Pozdnyshev's harangue in favor of chastity in marriage and against women who keep men from achieving this ideal. There is certainly no difficulty in proving the charge of misogyny, which Rancour-Laferriere takes great pains to relate to Tolstoy's loss of his mother just a few weeks before he was two years old. The murder of the wife becomes matricidal rage against the woman who had lavished her love of Lev's older brother Nikolay, a mother whose death left him to be nurtured by a series of nurses and governesses who were to be the objects of displaced rage before his wife took over the role, still later to be played in the fiction by Pozdnyshev's wife.
Readers of The Kreutzer Sonata have proved quite capable of eschewing the advice of chastity, especially since it comes from a protagonist whose increasing nervous agitation leads to shrill exaggeration. For Pozdnyshev the only differ